No Context: The Hold Steady at McCarren Park

Posted by Zach Baron at 4:14 PM, June 30, 2008

photos by Rebecca Smeyne

The Hold Steady
McCarren Park Pool
June 29

Love the sly attempt on the Hold Steady’s “Magazines” to get New York involved in the band’s mythology: A familiar portrait of yr average HS Twin Cities barfly, unattainable, past her prime, but then Finn slips the nod in—“New York gets pretty heavy/Girl I hope it doesn’t crush you.” Their newest, Stay Positive, is out now, kind of. Certainly enough people at McCarren Park Pool knew the lyrics.

Mentioning New York in song may be the last thing these guys need—I’m thinking here of Jonathan Lethem, reporting back from Cannes in 2001 about the standing ovation Godard received for Éloge de l’amour, the guy looking “as tired as someone who’d borne the freight of so many expectations for so many years probably ought to look,” i.e. very. The band themselves looked a bit embarrassed at the messianic cards they were dealt yesterday: hours of rain and a hastily winnowed crowd turned to sun and an avalanche of returnees five minutes before Finn et al climbed onstage. “Hi, we’re the Hold Steady,” said Finn: “We’re gonna build something this summer.” And, like that, it was summer again, atmospherically, and the band was apologizing to the soaked opening acts for its own good luck. So when that New York line came around, you could see Finn sort of shrug and grin, fighting off that oncoming weight of having to be yet another city’s local prophet.

The new songs sound great, not that you doubted. I’ll put the last minute of “Yeah Sapphire”—the beseeching “I need someone to come and pick me up,” the slurry final chant of “I was a skeptic at first but these miracles work”—against anything the band’s done, crowd incitement–wise, anyway. On a day that doubled as guitarist Tad Kubler’s birthday, the band let him pull out the double-neck and gave him “the gift of soloing,” which my guess will be a feature of new HS shows all through this tour. The “November Rain” nods are getting harder to ignore, but then again, it’s just one example of how savvily the Hold Steady seize on things we shared in the past and rewrite them, with some scuff marks, for the present. I’ll spare everyone the discourse on the hardcore kid I used to be and the insanely apt way “Stay Positive” sums up how those years continue to hang around for those of us that lived ‘em—suffice to say, when Finn hit that part about “We couldn’t have even done this if it wasn’t for you,” I knew I wasn’t alone.

Oh, and speaking of which, shout to this guy.

No Context: Santos Party House

Posted by Zach Baron at 4:43 PM, June 27, 2008

Santos Party House
Thursday, June 26

I'm aware this Santos Party House thing requires some wishful thinking. Named in the style of your average teenager-run punk basement in Iowa City, located directly on the Mudd Club/Dave’s Luncheonette axis, and painted in nursery school–type primary/secondary colors inside, the place obviously hopes to be infinitely more gritty/comfy/casual that the speculative multi-million dollar endeavor it almost certainly is. There are at least 10 or 20 different definitions of what’s cool battling it out at SPH, from the multiple, impenetrable door lists and scantily-clad female clusterfuck entrance ritual to smoking hot merch girl wearing the house merch, on which yet another objectively attractive woman is pictured. Moby is in the building. And downstairs, guys with bucket hats, ponytails, and Hawaiian shirts are break-dancing, to the eventual delight of the 50-person cipher that howlingly circles in around them. At one point, a midget with a shirt that said “Little Jimmy” on the front and “Think Big” on the back got in the mix and krumped, and nobody blinked. The bar serves champagne in actual champagne flutes, parties of two argue over who’s paying while waving bills of such high denomination I had no idea such currency even existed, and onstage, Moby is DJing.

To my burgeoning catalogue of socially normative dances I will now add the maneuver I witnessed a couple times last night, which involved women who appeared to be dancing but were actually ordering drinks back over their shoulders, while seemingly unaware that their wildly gesticulating dancing hands contained actual objects that were hitting other people: a platinum credit card in one hand, an iPhone in the other. We’ll call this one the Young Media.

Not knowing where else in this city people go to dance, this is definitely the club to which I would go should the urge strike. On this particular night, puffed huge by the Maclean/Moby double bill on an otherwise sleepy Thursday night, the place looked a bit like someone’s parents had gone out of town. But the total piecemeal and seam-showing mix of ambition, outdated cool, probably pretty admirable profit margins, etc. does not at all trump SPH’s basic brilliance as an ersatz hang out spot. In a neighborhood where my next bartender, just down the block, sadistically poured Grey Goose in response to a request for a vodka soda and then gleefully charged 28 bucks for it, I’ll take the place with the krumping.

No Context: Love Is All at the Bowery Ballroom

Posted by Zach Baron at 2:35 PM, June 18, 2008

Love Is All at the Cake Shop last Thursday
photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Love is All
Bowery Ballroom
June 17

Easy to see now how Love is All's "Make Out Fall Out Make Up" is heroin to indie rock kids, all reigned-in abandon and bespoke signifiers (the "records" in the song's first couplet: "Records and clothes on the floor/Remind me of the night before"; cigarettes, red wine, smudged lipstick). As it happens, lots of tropes in this circle actually drive me to real despairing frustration. (The way openers and reunited indie stalwarts Versus ask "What is up?," instead of "What's up?"; their drummer, whose visibly intense concentration on the band’s unbelievably straightforward drum parts is itself distracting.) Even the faux-naif territory Love is All themselves swerve into-- frontwoman Josephine Olausson venturing out on stage like a tiny gremlin wrapped in an orange hoodie, giggling right into the mic--is probably too resigned for me, cute but pandering. To say nothing of Olausson taking about measuring things in "fahrenheits" and inviting the crowd to meet in the park tomorrow in order to eat pickled herring.

So kids that are prone to lose it in that ancient, '90s outdoor two-footed festival rock-hop/female-bassist-wears-a-bucket-hat sort of way (and who presumably nodded knowingly, approvingly at the review that launched the band, which began "What's the stat, 99% of all songs are love songs? And what's the other, 99% of all love songs make me want to slit my face?"; I looked for clarification on this, by the way, and instead found someone comparing the band to In Flames, so I hereby absolve myself for being three years behind the curve here), and who generally like cuddly love songs involving two cuddly and unthreatening people, really love this band. And why not?

Live, their habit of writing 70% of a part, not finishing it, and playing it really fast to cover the whole thing up, reads as sort of endearing. And the songs like "Turn the Radio Off," where the band does this gorgeous smear from high to low, the guitar up top and wistfully sad, the Essential Logic–type horns in the middle punching guts, the bass pinging around the top melody, and all three singers make it up to their mics and stretch things out even further--those songs are gorgeous in the best possible kind of swelling, anarchic, tight-but-about-to-unravel way. "This is a love song," Olausson announced halfway through, and then giggled--"What can I say?"

No Context: M83 at the Bowery Ballroom

Posted by Zach Baron at 3:35 PM, June 5, 2008

This lovely rendering of last night's show was done by Matt of the Syndicate Blog

M83
Bowery Ballroom
Wednesday, June 4

Fussy French dude Anthony Gonzalez’s M83 set up onstage pretty much like you’d expect: first somebody comes and drags one of those acoustic glass cages out around the drum set and you just know when the drummer emerges he’s going to have to wear headphones in order to hear what’s what; then the keyboard tree goes up stage left, ostentatiously studded with all sorts of incredibly expensive looking boxes surrounded by other custom high-tech boxes hand-forged or whatever for the purposes of protecting the original probably-custom boxes inside; the guitar amp, when it arrives stage right, is the incongruous size of a large suitcase. Gonzalez gets his own entrance/applause, then come the rest of the band. All four members have microphones, but the vox on the first song trickle out via sample, a troubling sign.

Saturdays=Youth, the band’s dreamy, diffuse newest, is probably overripe for an ersatz-Pitchfork weigh-in on the quality of the production, the record’s place in the band’s grand narrative, its title-telegraphed themes, and so on (see a champ do it here) but I’ve yet to figure out how to talk about it with people in real life, beyond marveling at the sound and making approving noises about this or that, er, texture. Oh, right, plus running down the references—Magnetic Fields, Cocteau Twins, JAMC, the ‘80s, to which I’d add Jesu, and since nobody’s talking about it, “Lunar Weight” from the new VSS Nervous Circuits reissue (a white-belted forbearer to “We Own the Sky”).

At Bowery though, the opening, yup, synth-figure of “We Own the Sky” is too gigantic for the clouds/sunsets/grassy fields/constellation Hydra paint-drying metaphors the band usually inspires—not when everybody in the venue’s just jumping up and down. Plus—and this one’s for like five people, if that—you then notice that little tick-tick-tick figure high up in the percussion the band turns around in the second verse comes straight from Diplomatic Immunity II’s “Aayoo-iight,” remember?

Pretty sure this is how people listen to M83: they just pick out whatever stratum of sound that sound that sneaks up and trip off into free-associational space. (Status Aint Hood thinks about Blade Runner a whole lot while listening to M83, is what I just found out; stay tuned for his upcoming Pink Floyd track-for-track Wizard-of-Ozzing of Saturdays=Youth, unless somebody dies.) Live, however, the presence of arguably smokin’-hot keyboardist (she had her back to me the whole time, so who knows) and new-agey vocalist Morgan Kibby almost certainly bends most of these fantasias towards the same fantasia, for the men on the floor anyway. “I love you keyboard girl!” someone shouted between songs, which if you think about it, is a way better song title than “Highway of Endless Dreams.”

No Context: Time in the Wild, The Jammys

Posted by Zach Baron at 4:12 PM, May 8, 2008

Jammys
MSG
May 7

Obviously the norms and folkways of the dudes in hats and sandals who attend things like the Jammys are the proverbial fish/Phish in a barrel—the Burning Man that records fatalities annually when it falls on oblivious hippies, the propensity of the movement’s heroes to be rolly-polly dudes who do things like play the mouth-trumpet and seem like they’d be really good dads—so let’s stick to just one cultural practice. Not sure what they call that dance guys do, where you hop up and down but also swing your fists and play an imaginary flute, kind of like the one the Grateful Dead bears are known for? Let’s call it the Kokopelli.

Anyway the thing I saw that was more amazing than “blue turtle seduction” or Chevy Chase playing “A Natural Woman,” lounge-piano version, was this dude who would go get beer and then come back and then go the bathroom and come back, etc., who could climb the WaMu@MSG stairs in full, uninterrupted Kokopelli, without tripping. When Leslie West played “Mississippi Queen” this individual did accidentally punch me in the face in an obvious rush of adrenaline, but his Kokopelli remained flawless.

Consonances: didn’t get the Doug E. Fresh/Chali 2na presence on the bill until I saw Matisyahu battle some guitar player with his mouth. Call the presence of the Jay-Z/Mary J tour in the same building as the Jammys a metaphor for beatboxing, which is apparently some sort of East meets West between dudes who wear their Yankee caps with the brims totally straight and those who bend them nearly in half. Matisyahu on Phish: “It was the first time in my life I’d experienced music so deep.”

As for me, it was the first time I experienced music played by a guy doing slap bass on an acoustic guitar that had no hole in it.

No Context: Empire II Screens, Thurston Moore Scores

Posted by Zach Baron at 4:26 PM, April 30, 2008

Empire II
Gershwin Hotel
Tuesday, April 29

What else could possibly represent the Tribeca Film Festival’s odd combination of real estate speculation, downtown nostalgia, self-mythology, and liquid assets better than a Warhol-checking film from the one-time maker of Blank Generation, shot out of the casement window of his Manhattan apartment? Amos Poe, standing before a clutch of vaguely affluent Tuesday-nighters in the converted lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, wears star-freckled pajama pants as he introduces his “no budget, no wave” version of Rear Window: Empire II, after Warhol’s eight-hour original. Poe’s film—a year’s worth of footage compressed into three hours, with all the day and night and snow, spring, and rain the interval entailed—simulates a wandering but comfortably ensconced Flatiron eye, shot out of some seriously sizeable windows, often past a varied and pleasingly fresh array of flowers that share the sill with his camera.

If Warhol’s unblinking Empire was stubbornly about the minutes you passed watching it, or the minutes you watched passing it, Empire II evokes the feeling really good real estate gives you: being completely impervious to time. Poe’s idyll is unmolested by the pedestrians he occasionally deigns to film, the cars that zip by them, the clocks that turn in a nearby tower. Clouds race by, their shadows with them, but the view remains eternal.

Preempting what for the ages will supposedly be “a richly layered soundtrack of songs and city noises” are, tonight, Thurston Moore, Matt Hayner, and Tom Surgal, improvising accompaniment directly in front of, and a little bit below, Poe’s film. They seem to be present mostly to alleviate boredom, which they do: Moore’s cunning abstractions match perfectly with the hexagonal lights of cars that cross the screen, the band’s improv keeping time with Amos’s cut-for-cut-for-cut eye on the motion outside. Surgal, facing forward, isn’t even watching the film. As it speeds by behind the trio, they appear to be working in slow motion, another ironic reduction in scale—if the Empire State building can play prop, why not three grizzled no-wavers?

Empire II plays on Friday, May 2 @ Pace University and Saturday, May 3 @ Village East Cinema.

No Context: Leif Garrett Pinups, Sonic Youth Cassettes, Kiss Makeup at the New Museum

Posted by Zach Baron at 2:50 PM, April 25, 2008

Steven Shearer, Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar, 1997

Double Album: Daniel Guzmán + Steven Shearer
New Museum
April 24

What a drag, being forced to behold the basic, untransubstantiated stuff of semi-music-related pop-culture—Leif Garrett pinups, Sonic Youth cassette tapes, Kiss makeup, Stooges logos—in places that could do better, like the New Museum. The general reverse Warholing of that which has been already Warholed, the bland regard for totems that already swim in self-regard; the idea that mass culture rock n roll can stand in for your identity in a way that transcends the manner in which it stands in for my identity: isn’t this the exact illusion we burn off when we become adults and realize that when we were sixteen, we were not in fact alone, were not in fact on some other planet? That we were in it together? That our concert T-shirts had twins?

Beyond the general is-what-it-is—Guzmán’s Kiss figurines reconceived as Day of the Dead dolls (Kiss My Ass), Shearer’s portraits of longhairs (Longhairs)—Double Album’s sure to elicit shrugs from those who own TVs and listen to music. The general agony comes when you realize that at least half the show is one irretrievably mixed metaphor, from the title on down. Ultimate mashup prize goes to Guzmán’s Burn, which flips a Deep Purple album title into two stacks of last week's Village Voice and a couple of semi-figurative plaster busts—bam, Twin Towers. As for Shearer, he lays a Warlock bass guitar down inside a child’s windowed play space—bam, Reverse Panopticon. But why not commit to a real shocker? Why not just dress the Warlock in an undershirt and no pants and videotape it making love to Amy Poehler, who’s on the cover of this week’s Voice? Instead of filming it inside a children’s play set, why not shoot it inside the office of New Museum chief curator Richard Flood, while he plays the Warlock to the tune of “New York Groove”? Why not just go ahead and make it a three-way with a nine-foot tall Cousin It figure made entirely out of fake gold rapper chains?

No Context for Old Men: Things I Learned Watching Shine a Light

Posted by Zach Baron at 4:55 PM, April 17, 2008

Things I Learned from Watching Shine a Light
Union Square
April 17

Blame it on the debates last night, the spectacle one more time of a supposed elder talking sternly down to anyone in earshot who happens to be younger, the upshot as always I was there, as if being present then were somehow proxy for being fit to be present anywhere, in any position, ten or twenty or forty years later. Thus Shine a Light’s Keith Richards can blithely intone, as if bestowing upon his audience some timeworn piece of wisdom, “It’s good to see you all. It’s good to see anybody,” with an absolute surety as to the equal anonymity of anyone not named Mick, Charlie, or Ronnie, and his audience will crack up—because, of all things, they basically agree.

No surprise the Rolling Stones, circa 2008, turn out to be the kind of band—as we find out, a few thousand feet up in first class—that splits the list of potential songs for the night’s set into the categories of “Well Known” and “Medium Known.” Boiling self-regard scalds tepid modesty, and so we get Bill Clinton introducing the band by noting his birthday present is “opening” for the Rolling Stones. Aced out entirely in proceedings is the film’s ostensible maker, Marty Scorcese, who has at last apparently found four men whose schtick is more entrenched than his own. He can’t get a set list, which is hilarious, because who, at this point, doesn’t know exactly what the band is going to play?

All credit to Buddy Guy, who comes onstage in front of the two Clintons in the audience to vow he’ll get high tomorrow, just as sure as his name, and none to Keith Richards, who apparently mistakes him for a guy who’s short on guitars, and so gives him one at the end with the preposterous benediction: “It’s yours.” “I don’t think onstage,” says Keith, offstage, “I feel.”

Scorcese, meanwhile, realizes what he’s up against too late, and settles for his own version of two hours of greatest hits: arrhythmic cutting, cameras that swoop, fun at the mixer when the camera gets close in on a Keith (but somehow, never Ronnie) solo, a Goodfellas nod at the end, when he walks the camera backstage and then outside, past, yup, a couple more Marty Scorceses and, for a finale, transforming a CGI moon over Manhattan into a Rolling Stones tongue. “I did a thousand things over there,” he says to no one in particular, “And nothing that I needed to do.”

For more responsible coverage:
Camille Dodero on Shine a Light
Tom Breihan on Shine a Light

No Context: John Varvatos Store Opens to Protesters at 315 Bowery

Posted by Zach Baron at 12:01 PM, April 10, 2008

John Varvatos Store
315 Bowery
April 8

“It means much more to me than the ringing of the registers that we did the right thing in here."—John Varvatos, mtv.com

“NYC should not be a town just for the wealthy – but who can afford these clothes? Mr. Varvatos caters to a wealthy, male-dominated major-label mainstream rock world that has no claim on the CB’s legacy whatsoever.”—Rebecca Moore, “Varvatos Protest – my comments” (photocopy/bluviolin.com)

Varvatos Protest, my comments:

As a rule, I suspect stores that try to fend off protestors by entreating them to “come see our employees”—the one rocker guy with golden headband, the other guy with the snakeskin NYHC Converse, the not-Kim Gordon-looking woman who told me to stop taking pictures because “we have all these crazy rules”—i.e., there’s still a band playing every night at CB’s, except they’re actually retail clerks, and they “play” by selling clothes. I thought about playing a leather jacket but then I realized spring is almost here.

That said, I noticed some items that I imagined would be there were missing:

One cape made out of the voluminous skin of Joey Ramone.

Hand-crafted thongs lovingly constructed out of tiles from the old CBGB bathroom floor.

An animatronic Robert Christgau punching an animatronic James Chance in the face.

A t-shirt silkscreened with a picture of John Varvatos’s face, except instead of ink the face is made out of Hilly Kristal’s ashes.

A big statue of the Statue of Liberty, but wearing eyeliner.

No Context: Heavy Metal in Baghdad. . . Actually Worth Seeing

Posted by Zach Baron at 1:40 PM, April 3, 2008

Heavy Metal in Baghdad
April 2
Anthology

One more sign of how yawningly distant Baghdad is from New York—the sight of Vice idiots Suroosh Alvi and and Eddy Moretti strapping on flak jackets outside their Baghdad hotel, spooked like guys who just happened to take a wrong turn on their way to work out on N. 10th St. Into the frame rush the security team, a band of shooters that starts at two and swells to 12 as the local Iraqis realize their wards have literally no conception of the danger they’re dealing with. “Journalists…it’s not safe for them,” one guard finally breaks down and explains. “Or for the guys that protect them.”

This to say nothing of the predicament that the subjects of last night’s doc, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, find themselves in. First-and-so-far-last-ever Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda—“the Black Scorpion,” named for the most deadly of all scorpions—can’t really headbang (looks like Jewish prayer), can’t really wear Slipknot t-shirts (looks American), can’t grow their hair long (ditto), can’t play a show pre-Saddam without including “Youth of Iraq” (the “Freebird”-type request/demand made by Saddam’s Culture and Media Ministry, in which Arassicauda take the bait and rhyme “Hussein” with “insane”). After Saddam, the four guys can’t really go outside at all, and then their practice space gets rocketed.

Enter Vice, who take a Gideon Yago tip and decide to sponsor a show in post-occupation Baghdad. Alvi and Moretti do the gonzo thing—lots of chest-hair, aviator lenses, and giggling—until they finally make it into the country and realize this time, they might really die. Friendship with the four Arassicaudans ensues. The Americans miss the first concert go-round, in a not-quite-Green Zone hotel where the power keeps failing, but finally zig-zag in from the airport intact. They smoke cigarettes on their hotel roof, watch the helicopters fly by, and meet in secret with band ringleader Firas al-Lateef, who plays bass and is the group’s philosopher—“It’s just a crazy mission, dude” he apologetically tells Moretti and Alvi, when they ask about their prospects.

A reunion in Damascus ensues, where the band can’t work and its members live in the unheated basement of a Syrian project. The neighbors complain about the noise, so practice is out, but the band gets in one show and, on Vice’s dime, a recording session. Afterwards they all hit the hotel minibar and Marwan, the drummer, is so happy he promises the camera: “I’m gonna tell my kids about this, if I ever have one of those fuckers.” (Firas, who has one already, makes no such promise.) Then they see Vice footage of their time back in Iraq and two of them start crying. All credit to Moretti and Alvi, who’ve filmed enough faux fucked-up stuff to not flinch when they stumble onto the real thing.

News from the Q+A afterwards is that Arassicauda are now in Turkey (tickets courtesy of Vice donation drive), after being denied entry to the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, and the UK. Alvi and Moretti remain in touch, and both sat in on the band’s most recent (read: third) round of interviews with Homeland Security. Slipknot’s manager is interested, as are much of the rest of the metal community, but they’ve got to get here first.

No Context: Crystal Castles, Ripsters at Studio B

Posted by Zach Baron at 3:01 PM, March 26, 2008

photo by Rebecca Smeyne

No Context

Crystal Castles+Health
Studio B
March 25

Two kids in 40-degree weather, neither wearing jackets. The Studio B bouncers are playing that game where they see how long it takes for the first fifteen-year-old girl to pass out. Perfect time for a game of telephone: Fernando Eats Bagels While Playing the Banjo, some girl whispers in my ear. At that very moment, by that very magic, the line starts moving. The ripsters are saved.

***

Two kids, enormous necks hidden by the new neck-scarves invented by the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend, have a conversation.

“No Country?”

“Just like the movie. Dialogue and everything.”

“The Road?”

“Post-apocalyptic.”

***

Two kids, bald, jacked, dance wildly. Sweat flies off their heads. They don’t clap—they howl. Howling, the taller one says to the shorter one: “When are these guys going to play a good song?”

***

I head for the door. Some girl comes up, whispers in my ear. “Hypothesis: Even a nerd can become buff. Materials and Methods: Weights, running, push-ups, pull-ups. Repeat as needed. Results: Six-pack, muscled pecs.”

“Pass it on,” she says.

No Context: Speak Up! With Lou Reed, Moby, Antony, and More

Posted by Zach Baron at 11:00 AM, March 20, 2008

photo by Noelle D'Arrigo

No Context

Speak Up!: A Benefit Concert for Peace in Iraq and Justice at Home
St. Ann’s Warehouse
Tuesday, March 18

Hats off to the famed American pop star Moby, whose Iraq War as Venus Flytrap, or “shark’s mouth,” was the most tortured of literally hundreds of tortured analogies tossed from press-conference folding tables and a St Ann’s stage during Speak Up!: A Benefit Concert for Peace in Iraq and Justice at Home. Prize to Antony Hegarty for overall incoherence—“4,000 brave American countrymen dead… I’m just an artist, not a politician…let’s make a pile of dead bodies so we feel better”—and to Damien Rice, for a nifty parable involving giving a small child millions of dollars to squander, a metaphor for waste and profligacy that I assumed would touch down somewhere near the Iraq War budget, and which instead landed a few hundred miles away: “We get a million sperm delivered to our testicles every day.”

Someday, Antony predicted last night, each and every one us will have to account for our actions. The putative Allies we once were will land on American soil with questions as to our whereabouts during the first five years of Iraq war, and “like the Germans in World War II,” we will have to look the rest of the world in the eye and answer. It will be at this moment that I offer up my seventy-five dollars in campaign contributions to Barack Obama and, after some fumbling through the ol’ wallet, my comped ticket stub to Speak Up!, featuring Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Antony, David Byrne, Norah Jones, Moby, Rice, and the Scissor Sisters, plus Bill T. Jones, Richard Belzer, and half of DUMBO’s more affluent supporters of great causes throughout the planet.

I expect zero mercy.

Oh, but line ahead of me will be long: Judith Miller (“tarred and feathered,” according to Moby); George W. Bush (“Hermann Göring,” quoth Belzer); Alito, Roberts, Gonzalez, and Ashcroft; not to mention every other stooge—McCain, Clinton, and Obama not excepted—who fiddled while Basra burned. With luck, the woman whose Bob Marley ring-tone interrupted Lou Reed mid-sentence during the press conference beforehand will be let off with a warning. As for the DJ duo MEN, who chose “Paper Planes” to soundtrack a slideshow of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photographs of injured soldiers out in the lobby: good luck ladies.

For those whose go-to caricature of an over-rich, sanctimonious, loft-dwelling liberal involves Starbucks, NPR, and homosexuality, let me instead propose an alternative. Imagine, for a change, your chosen Birkenstock-clad, latte-sipping nemesis on a cavernous stage, a guitar slung round his or her neck. With eyes squeezed tight, fingers even now reaching out across the instrument’s many frets, he or she takes a deep breath, and with a mighty downstroke, summons forth the “Star Spangled Banner,” Hendrix version.

What? Not enough? Add, as the first notes swell, a disturbance in the curtain: here come famous liberals Moby, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Antony Hegarty! At St. Ann’s, this tableau comes to life posthaste, first thing, Reed taking liberties with the lyrics, all four stars wailing into their mics as if soon, perhaps by the very hand of Hendrix himself, a cleansing fire might sweep across the stage and change the world forever. Instead, up next: Norah Jones.

According to the furious woman next to me, this is the exact moment I stopped paying attention, but let me share some of my notes, to round this thing out. Jones covering Randy Newman; Air America’s Laura Flanders name-checking George Orwell and Thomas Paine; David Byrne!; Laurie Anderson doing her George S. W. Trow–homage “Only an Expert”; global warming; WMDs; Al Gore; torture; illegal invasion; “Maybe If I Fall”; habeas corpus; deportations; Belzer telling a heckler, “I work alone, pal”; Blonde Redhead; Scissor Sisters, who appear to have an Aladdin genie refugee behind the bongos, and who eventually cover “I Love a Man in Uniform”; Moby, in particular Moby doing “Honey,” the live-scatting of which I leave to you to imagine at home; Damien Rice; and Belzer again, this time threatening to shoot a dog.

I left during Hegarty: Back in February, he said, he’d started to cry in the voting booth, the tears brought on “by the weight of the future.” Heavy indeed.

Iraq Veterans Against the War here; NYC United for Peace and Justice here.

No Context: Be Your Own Pet at the Mercury Lounge

Posted by Zach Baron at 2:50 PM, February 21, 2008

CREDIT

Be Your Own Pet
Mercury Lounge
February 21

Be Your Own Pet’s new record is called Get Awkward, but they could’ve called it Get Giddy, Go Faster, Can I Borrow Your ID, or Don’t Mess With Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re getting old,” jokes Jemina Pearl, her band having just taken a year off, a year that in teenage time is more like three or four. “Come up here and mess with me.” And how rare is this, someone does.

Like any other band BYOP probably sing about dancing more than they actually go dancing, fighting more than they actually fight, but when Jemina Pearl hits somebody, they go back a few feet at least. Her right has whatever six-foot-something, 200-pound drunk comedian who got onstage to amuse himself or his friends staggering a couple steps, visibly calculating whether he can get away with hitting a girl in front of a few hundred people, what are the chances of him walking out the Mercury Lounge with his dignity intact, etc. He ends up reaching for her; he’s on the ground, and Jonas Stein and Nathan Vasquez are retuning the guitars they detuned laying this guy out on floor. I’ve seen worse fights but maybe none so one-sided.

So maybe call it Get Knocked Out. On Get Awkward, BYOP go looking for somebody to kill, somebody to stab, somebody’s brains they can eat; they go to graveyard parties, food fights, stay up all night. If debut Be Your Own Pet was about riding bikes, having fuuuuuun, adventuring, vacationing, Get Awkward’s the revenge record. In order: Pearl feels like she’s living in a black hole, cheats on her boyfriend cause somebody else makes her stomach hurt more, goes to juvie for stabbing an ex-best-friend, gets out, pops pills, gets in a food fight, confronts the beast within, resolves to just quit sleeping and start living. Stein and Vasquez nod to girl-groups, new-wavers, mock-operatic suites but mostly just play faster; Pearl, confident at 16, stays on her sideways drawl even longer at 20, drawing out the threats, upping the contempt.

At the Mercury Lounge, they were clearly off their game, rusty, out of it a bit after time off. “Sorry about all this tuning shit,” said Stein towards the end, the band’s tommy gun spray slowed to bursts. Yelled an audience member: “That’s what happens when you fuck someone up with your guitar!”

No Context: Orchestral Black Sabbath (Backwards) at Passerby

Posted by Zach Baron at 3:30 PM, February 14, 2008

No Context

“From Beyond”
GBE@Passerby
Wednesday, February 13

On YouTube there is a vast and growing sub-category of videos that dwell on the total destruction of the earth by mankind, videos that start with a tranquil shot of the earth from outer space. The segue to apocalypse is handled differently by different auteurs, but the elements of the deck remain pretty constant: Mushroom cloud; man walking on the moon; one missile colliding with another missile in midair; mushroom cloud; reprise. These clips unfurl with uniformly grim soundtracks, and the number-one soundtrack pick for “war its such a brutal planet”- and “fuck planet earth”-type montages that abound in the 18-or-older backrooms of the Broadcast Yourself empire turns out to be, over and over again, Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void.” The reasons for this choice are self-evident. Sabbath's proto-environmentalist, nuclear-winter anxiety dream imagines the population of planet Earth riding rockets to safety and the sun, a scenario that seems will soon come to pass and is also comparatively easy to animate. Other takes on “Into the Void” have included doom metal and ecoterrorism, but Sabbath's never really been touched in terms of out and out depressive clarity, and at this point they probably never will be.

Forwards, “Into the Void” sounds a bit like a factory collapsing, the metallic clank of the bassline grating off the most merciless Iommi-downstrokes in a catalogue consists of nothing but. Backwards, it turns out, “Into the Void” sounds. . . uplifting. I refer here to “From Beyond,” the Lucas and Jason Ajemian art piece/conservatory gag in which “Into the Void” is transcribed backwards and arranged for classical orchestra. “From Beyond” is an Boston Pops concept that in execution—say, at GBE@Passerby, where it was performed three times in a row last night—might be the best performance I’ve seen this year.

“From Beyond” has a bit of corollary in themusic-not-music American Idol slums of rock simulacra—someone might suggest that’s why it’s proving to be such effective gallery fodder—but it’s also an undeniably exciting piece of music, jagged and squawky but with a straight line running right through it. Predictably, the performance has already been gobbled up by the more experimental wing of the museum world: it debuted at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and will have its reprise this summer in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Of two brothers, Lucas Ajemian, who handles the yzzO vocals, is the artworld connect. Jason, who did the arranging, is a wild-eyed music-school graduate in a trapper hat and a suit two sizes too big, and he conducts standing on a paint bucket.

The orchestra ran small at Passerby, at about thirteen pieces, thirteen conservatory types cribbing off sheet music and grimacing at the fast parts. The audience grimaced too. Swing, that quality that separates us from the animals, is mercilessly stamped-out going the right way through "Into the Void" but returns when the piece is played backwards. Figures, if you think about how all the movement in a Sabbath song, when turned around, inverts from down to up.

"He's a conservatory master," whispered a friend, admiring Ajemian as he rode the bucket. But afterwards, Jason told a different story: "This is the first thing I've conducted in my life."

No Context: Exodus and Goatwhore at BB Kings

Posted by Zach Baron at 11:16 AM, February 7, 2008

No Context

Exodus + Goatwhore
BB King Blues Club and Grill
February 4

About the still mystifying phenomenon of metal shows at New York’s BB King Blues Club and Grill: Is it that King is so old, so pre-rock-n-roll that there is absolutely no difference in his mind between hosting a weekly Beatles Brunch featuring Strawberry Fields and a death metal band from Thibodaux, Louisiana called Goatwhore? Or are we looking at a Southern Hospitality type situation, wherein King plays the proverbial Mashantucket Pequot to some old white wizard of Oz with a dream by the name of Foxwoods? Because one wonders what might cross King’s mind were he to see Exodus perform in his own Times Square establishment.

Exodus are the band Kirk Hammett left in 1983 in order to join Metallica, and they’ve since had the exact sort of luck their origin story might suggest. As the rearguard member of the so-called thrash metal “Big Four,” Exodus had the privilege of carrying water not just for Metallica but for Slayer and Megadeth as well. Faddish popularity, Nirvana, and the Judgement Night soundtrack helped torpedo their genre’s lasting chances right around the day they signed a major label deal. They were left behind in a subculture of their own devising: 1989’s Fabulous Disaster contained the tune “Toxic Waltz,” on which then brand-new replacement vocalist Steve Souza heralded the “violent fun” of the mosh-pit, thus giving birth to a thousand terrifying guys like Exodus’ own current singer, Rob Dukes. “Back in ’89,” says Dukes from the stage on Monday night, “I was doing a lot of fucking drugs and alcohol, and I was a…FABULOUS...DISASTER!” He was also in high school at the time.

Dukes’ contribution to The Atrocity Exhibition, the otherwise not-too-bad record the band released last year, was “Children of a Worthless God,” god there being Allah. “For those extremist motherfuckers who fly planes into buildings,” warned Dukes on Monday: “I’ve got nothing but death for them.” This because they’re all children of a worthless god, a point he reprised by asking us to “fuck the Middle East.” Later the sentiment returned as “fuck New England” in tribute to Giants fans in the crowd.

Goatwhore were the openers, and to my left some dude had mashed-up the two bands, sporting corpse-paint a la Goatwhore’s armor, an Exodus T-shirt, and combat boots, the common thread being, I guess, that both bands encourage you to think about killing somebody. “How many of you douchebags downloaded Atrocity Exhibition for free?” asked Dukes, finally speaking my language. As the cheers went up, he held up his middle finger: “I knew it you motherfuckers.”

No Context: The Teenagers Live at Mercury Lounge

Posted by Zach Baron at 1:46 PM, January 31, 2008

The Teenagers play tonight, January 31, at the Hiro Ballroom and on Saturday, February 2 at Studio B.

photo by Ryan Dombal

DOWNLOAD
The Teenagers, "Starlett Johansson" (MP3)

The Teenagers
Mercury Lounge
January 30

The Teenagers’ “Streets of Paris” is like an illiterate version of Pulp’s “Common People,” where all the class details are compressed into a couple lines about Nike caps and the chorus comes in under 30 seconds. “The streets of Paris,” they sing. “Man, it’s crazy.” They wrote a song called “Starlett Johansson,” a seventh-whiskey pickup attempt in which our narrator manages to get turned on by the fact that Johansson “whispers in horses’ ears.” That will do it for your band in the MySpace era, but to guarantee the eventual XL contract, they dug up “Homecoming,” a sub-Strokes ballad about fucking a girl who’s “a cheerleader,” “a virgin,” and “really tan.” The chorus is a charming Grease-style interplay in which one dude says “I fucked my American cunt” and then a blank-sounding girl agrees: “I loved my English romance.”

Actually, the band’s French, although they live in the UK. Though they say “cunt" on their record they also say, “You know we’re gonna make it!” on “Make it Happen” and “We’re teenagers, we don’t care!” on “Streets of Paris.” Not exactly the type of reserved, masculine sentiment that might allow you to crush tourists on holiday. Imagine, I guess, something like the Modern Lovers starring in University Sluts Of St. Petersburg 2.

Which, come to think of it, might not have been so different from the University Sluts of the Upper West Side tableau unfolding down the block last night at Vampire Weekend’s sold-out Bowery Ballroom victory lap. Since I’m not convinced that a band has ever formed without some expectation of eventual ejaculation, the Teenagers’ appeal to the “teenage girls of Europe and New York,” as they had it from the Mercury Lounge stage last night, didn’t seem particularly reprehensible. And although I don’t think they’re smart enough to be sending up much of anything, the fact that this so-called trio has, in addition to the three main guys, a female drummer and a female rhythm guitarist who plays half the riffs makes for a decent joke at their own expense.

They’re not teenagers, by the way. Bassist Michael Szpiner is 26. The three had adult jobs before doing a band. But they are a naifish act, in that they write their songs about the exact things that take place in their everyday lives. On “Love No,” a girlfriend tells one of them to stop spending so much time in front of his computer. He tells her he doesn’t love her anymore—making them the most debauched emo band of all time. It’s all girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, and girls they want for their next girlfriend. That your average teenager might merely allude to last night where the Teenagers will describe in detail what happened can be chalked up to the trio being a decade older and from the continent.

“You’re cooler than we are,” said their singer, Quentin Delafon, at one point. Their bassist, Dorian Dumont, got nervous and attempted to end the set a song early. As it turns out, their songs are good to the exact extent that Delafon can awkwardly dance to them. They’re giddy without meaning to be. “Feeling Better,” which rhymes “teenagers” and “feeling better” and talks about wanting to make the world a better place, is probably a sincere song, but that only occurred to me later. I was walking into the Bowery Ballroom Vampire Weekend circus and saw Dumont and Szpiner walking out. We passed each other on the stairs. When I got to the top, VW's Ezra Koenig had just finished asking, “Do you want to fuck?”

No Context: Sia and the Big Rainbow Bus

Posted by Camille Dodero at 1:30 PM, January 10, 2008

No Context

by Zach Baron

Sia
Apple Store SoHo
January 9th, 4pm

Sia
Virgin Megastore Union Square
January 9th, 7pm

If you are a recording artist in 2008, there will inevitably come a day where you will have to sit down with whoever is manufacturing your new record and decide how to convince people to buy it. You’ve invested time and they’ve invested money; neither of you wants to return to the coffee shop from which you came. But, as a matter of fact, maybe someone will say, maybe you do want to go back to the coffee shop. Starbucks is now as big a music retailer as they come. Your bassist may chime in, at this point, and note that there are still a few scrappy music shops holding on—maybe he’s even been a clerk in one or two of them—and they, too, still retain a bit of muscle. Like, say, the Virgin Megastore. At this point the obvious will dawn—most people buy their music, if they do so at all, from iTunes—and someone will write Apple Store on the back of a napkin, and this is how you will find yourself on a gigantic rainbow-colored bus, driving through lower Manhattan on a targeted search for your consumer.

Nothing against Sia here, the Australian-via-the-UK journeyman singer who's already taken her lumps riding every doomed trend from the last decade of pop music: late nineties acid jazz; early oughts white girl R&B; lusty adult contempo; trip-hop about eight years too late. And, most recently, one-hit fame the new industry way: a big television moment on the soundtrack to the finale of Six Feet Under. If this is your career, and a man in a suit comes to you and tells you to get on the rainbow bus, you get on the rainbow bus.

Her promotional slate in service of Some People Have Real Problems—out this past Tuesday—yesterday included Starbucks at noon (Astor Place), the Apple Store at 4pm (SoHo), and a finale on a Virgin Megastore stage at 7pm (Union Square). Not having anything at stake, myself, I caught the latter two—although I did glimpse the bus in Astor Place on my way in to work. In each case, she and her band performed mere feet from the merchandise. After each performance, she sat for an autograph line. In Union Square, I saw a couple of fans with their faces painted in a decent replication of her new album cover, waiting anxiously in line. The Megastore took the opportunity to rip through her album once more on the overhead speakers, what with the sympathetic audience and all.

Let’s be reasonable. Sia’s jazz-honk voice, which is actually so powerful it survived three shows and what her doctor apparently diagnosed between the latter two as the flu, would overpower anything but a soundtrack. At the Apple Store, where her band was denied their drum set, her voice shot out like water from a firehouse wielded by a 12-year-old girl, spraying an unsuspecting consumer tableau worse than their drummer ever could have. With such a formless talent, no wonder she’s been at the mercy of every lousy trend in demand of a female vocal. I do not know if she writes her own songs, but it would be hard to tell if she did. Two, in particular – “Little Black Sandals,” an extended metaphor about leaving a man you know you should leave even when your heart is trying to stop you, and “Academia,” which sports the couplet “You're a difficult equation with a knack for heart evasion/Will you listen to my proof or will you add another page on?”—have the distinct ring of something banged out by an anonymous songwriter on the plane ride over to the studio. But again, for all I know, they’re hers.

I’m not sure if you’re meant, as a fan, to go to one or all three. Certainly songs got recycled. And she reprised the trick of asking an audience member in the front row his name, and then dedicating a song to him—once in SoHo, twice in Union Square. But let’s not make too much of this, on a jaunt that was so nakedly about massaging an audience. Fact is, what would you do? It finally occurred, while waiting their second (actually, third) round out, that they were waiting it out too.

No Context: Vincent Gallo's RRIICCEE Live at the Green Room

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:15 AM, December 10, 2007

A Study of RRIICCEE at Eyedrum in Atlanta, Georgia by getzsch

No Context by Zach Baron

RRIICCEE
Green Room
December 7

The definition of irrational public behavior is probably something along the exact lines of attending a Friday night musical performance at the Green Room on Bleecker Street and expecting to see the band’s guitarist get a blowjob onstage, but people usually think of Vincent Gallo as being the irrational one. Similarly, you could call the fact that he spent most of his band’s set on his knees an apt reversal, but it’s not like he’s the first rock musician to adopt the pose.

Anyway I remember liking Gallo’s last record for Warp, Recordings of Music for Film, and I also remember liking Hole, and so the potential for eight inches was probably only the third or fourth reason I went to see RRIICCEE, Gallo’s new band with Hole’s Eric Erlandson.

Still, Gallo being a narcissistic guy is the gist of the evening. There were a couple of merch guys selling “one of a kind found articles” (i.e. lost-and-found street garments) “hand silkscreened by RRIICCEE” for 50 dollars—shades of Vincent Gallo's $3,000 Childhood Hopalong Cassidy Bedspread, available online accompanied by a letter of authenticity, or more infamously, the $50,000-$1,000,000 personal services offered to any “naturally born” female. As far as the actual noise goes, RRIICCEE’s music trends somewhere between a trebly Slint with no real basslines and an inferior drummer and a less lush MONO or Explosions in the Sky, punctured by a set-closing Gallo falsetto. This mattered to the genuine spectacle insofar as there wasn’t much spectacle to be had, so at some point listening was inevitable.

But what you didn’t end up hearing at the Green Room was more suggestive: the visible dissonance of forcing a veteran arena man like Erlandson to play minimal art-rock instead of big melodic chords, or Gallo’s repeated pleas to an already dazed Rebecca Casabian on keyboards to play “Slower!” She resembled any number of put upon and be-lipsticked Mark E. Smith keyboardists, and like Mark E., Gallo has burned through any number of musical collaborators prior to RRIICCEE: Sean Lennon, Jean Michel Basquiat, Lucas Haas, etc. Which is no surprise for someone who’s been trying to talk himself into suspecting or outright hating Jews, gays, African-Americans, and liberals for the last decade or longer. Quoted in this paper’s Brown Bunny review was this paradigmatic Gallo comment on collaboration: “The question is not how did I do it all myself: It's, How did I put up with the incompetence of the people I had to work with?” (Also contained within this same review is the world’s best summary of the Brown Bunny’s plot using the fewest words, e.g. “The film finds Gallo driving alone for 100 minutes, then forcing a torturous blowjob on Chloë Sevigny.”)

So Gallo gives good quotes, although I didn’t ask him for any. His shows are more about self-presentation and Rene Ricard-esque unpredictability in action than how well he plays the guitar, and though I thought his band was alright I don’t think many people would listen if not for celebrity diorama that RRIICCEE cuts onstage. Once it became clear nothing beyond effects pedals would be twisted, the bathroom trips got frequent, and rather than ducking when moving past the stage on their way there, people tended to slow down and gawk, as if they were at an aquarium and the band behind glass. It’s tempting to further the metaphor and note that the downtown New York of which Gallo is an undisputed graduate is like this too now, but for all I know Sonic Youth played the same underwhelming set in ’81.

No Context: Mountain Goats at NYU

Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:34 AM, December 3, 2007

No Context

by Zach Baron

The Mountain Goats
NYU Kimmel Center
November 29, 2007

Like so many of the homer fans John Darnielle now makes fun of from stages all across the United States, I’ll cop to an almost pathological aversion to anything made post-4AD, and to an equally Pavlovian fanboy response towards everything pre-. Darnielle knows this phenomenon, among other reasons because he’s as obsessive about records as the next guy chasing Taboo VI ‘cross eBay. Before one song last night, the 4:01-clocking “Tallahassee,” from Tallahassee, the record that marks the dividing line, he joked: “4:01! In the old days that was like 7 songs…”

Anyway this gets embarrassing, as far as public behavior goes. Me, mid-show, post-2002 composition: furious; disgustedly staring at the ground. Me, mid-show, pre-2002 composition: ecstatic; hopping. Generally I am the least stalker-like fan a band will ever obtain but there is the notable exception of the Mountain Goats, about which I develop theories.

One such theory, regarding audience affection, from an earlier draft of this very piece: “…Granted, this particular concert took place at NYU, but I’ve always fretted about the adoration Darnielle’s received in the 4AD era, which in regards to its character is less frantic and pushy and more messianic, which has always led me to worry about the effect being hailed as god might have on a man whose ideal rock show is the one put on by Heart on their Dreamboat Annie tour, etc etc…”

Look, who could argue that he doesn’t deserve it—even deserves the pair of girls who were right in front of me last night, wearing peasant blouses, flared jeans, and open mouths, who professed adoration for Peter Hughes—“I like this guy, whoever he is!” Characters who may well have been torn to pieces by a Mountain Goats crowd, circa ’97.

Again, call my knee-jerk what it is, which is involuntary. In the year that I discovered file-sharing and downloaded 40 different live Mountain Goats bootlegs, occupying my laptop’s tiny hard drive to the detriment of Word documents, pornography, other music, and emails more than three days old, the live-set refrain I inflicted on myself at the rough repeated frequency suggested by home hypnotism tapes was: “As you all know, I don’t write songs about myself.”

Famously this changed. Tallahassee, Darnielle’s trial run for 4AD, was a record about the Mountain Goats’ long-running, long-suffering Alpha couple, vodka-swilling and living near the Florida-Alabama border in decaying house with no children and no future; We Shall All Be Healed and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree and Get Lonely instead introduced a new character, one who’d never once graced any of the 500-odd songs the Mountain Goats had already written, whose name was John Darnielle.

Previously, avoiding the personal had always seemed a way of subtracting the confessional and bathetic stuff from the singer-songwriter paradigm. Writing about other people freed Darnielle up to act out, to identify, and for us to act out, and identify, and there you had it, the two-way street that gave birth to guys like myself who would later basically spit at the floor when Darnielle took a bigger piece of the action for himself.

‘Nuff said though; the new one, due next year, is called Heretic Pride, which is probably all the summary re: Darnielle’s POV necessary. The song “Heretic Pride,” which he previewed last night, is a banger – “old-school jams” is how he described the new record; fanboys take note – and hearing it was only one of many moments that exposed the whole split in the band’s catalogue for what it is—notional not actual.

Funny thing was, NYU was more Mountain Goats double-major fantasy-nerd than it was indie-citizen, slick-orchestrated Mountain Goats. Off tour, Darnielle and Hughes were in town for a one-shot, off-brand show: under-rehearsed, request-ready, off-the-cuff. Darnielle broke strings (“Old days, I used to break a string ever three songs”), did interpolations (from “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”: “…and the top three contenders, after weeks of debate, were Satan’s Fingers, and the HOLD STEADY, and the Hospital Bombers…”), and played ancient songs: “Love Cuts the Strings,” “Orange Ball of Hate, “Alpha Incipiens,” etc.

But it was “Dance Music,” from the ostensibly loathsome Sunset Tree, that got me worst, as the two coeds just in front of me began to first suggestively bang hips before in fact banging hips and then banging asses and then full-on grinding, I kid you not. They went to the floor. They came back up. Everyone shouted “I DON’T WANT TO DIE ALONE” and for a second we were all the same fan.

No Context: Mt. Eerie

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:36 AM, November 9, 2007

No Context by Zach Baron

Mount Eerie
Lutheran Church of the Messiah
Thursday November 8th

“I would like to fulfill the pregnant night—whatever that means,” goes Mount Eerie fan favorite and last night’s show closer, “Where?” As a riff on the performer himself, “Where?” is pretty advanced, a semantic stagger between “Mount Eerie,” the band that’s a front for one Phil Elverum, and “Mount Erie,” the mountain for which his band and his hometown in Anacortes, Washington are named:

"Where is Mount Eerie and how do I get there
And how long is the walk and what should I bring?"
Mount Eerie is nowhere.
Mount Eerie is playing tonight.
“Where is the concert and will it be all ages?
What time are doors?
And how much does it cost?”
The concert is nowhere.
There is only one sky.

Also referenced here is Elverum’s 2003 swapping out of his Microphones alias for that of Mount Eerie, which even at the time was described as make-believe: “In 2002 I went on an endless tour and stopped for the winter in northern Norway and died. The next spring I returned and pretended I was a different person and a different ‘band’ and ‘artist’ and ‘singer’ and everything.”

As it happens, the concert was in Greenpoint, it was all ages, and I’m pretty sure it cost 8 dollars.

Features of the earth mentioned in lyric: valleys, mountain wind, the sea, night air, white air, lonely, lonely night, dawn, a satiated bear, the world, racing clouds, ocean squalls, storms.

Features of the earth projected at the back of the stage: the moon over a dock in a lake, ferns on a rocky slope, a foundry, mist hanging over mountains and trees, trees blowing in wind and snow, craggy peaks covered in clouds. Bonus rim-shot: footage of the band SunnO))).

The projections were among other things a product tie-in, for Elverum’s new Mount Eerie Pts. 6 & 7—a double-sided ten-inch with two great songs on it, 132 pages of colorful photographs (preview here), and a book-style dust jacket. On it, Elverum mostly forgoes the plangent strumming for which he is loved in favor of piano-progressions, palm-muted shredding, dive-bomb pick slides, background operatic choruses, organ-sustains, and rattling percussion. And here is another contradiction attendant to the many that come attached to Mount Eerie: though the eighteen-year-old kids who pack his shows beg and beg for his older, man-and-a-guitar odes to nature, he hasn’t recorded a song fitting that particular bill since his Microphones days. Newer songs allude to that sound without conforming to it—too much noise, too many quirks, too abrupt, no choruses, etc.

New York has always seemed like fraught territory for Mount Eerie. A guy who loves nature this much, well, Brooklyn may be an awful place. The projected video at which Elverum gazed constantly, even though it was behind him, was a long time coming: a crutch, a way to get his mind right in order to sing odes to a dark that doesn’t even really exist within our city limits.

Before him his wife, the artist and illustrator Geneviève Castrée, who performs as Woelv, had bragged that her voice could “do the things little Simba can do in the French version of the Lion King,,” and both played in bare feet. Both incorporated heavy, off-beat breathing into their vocals; both often swallowed their words even as they emerged; both had arch, formal thank-yous for their adoring crowd: “Thank you for listening to me play these songs.” Neither, one guesses, is particularly fragile in a real life, offstage sense. And as irritating as the affect can sometimes be, to grownups anyway, it’s part of their project. How much of the traditional onstage pose can they strip away? What’s the least vocal and guitar combination that still results in a song?

As for “Where?,” Elverum wanted the crowd to sing along, but with time running out, he skipped actually sharing the lyrics with the audience, and went for telepathy instead: “Log on to my brain. I’m completely open. No password or anything. When you pull down the AirPort thing, it’s 'Mount Eerie Concert555.'”